The 1st International Conference on Model Hosts will focus on invertebrate, vertebrate and amoeboid systems used for the study of host-pathogen interactions, virulence and immunity, as well as on the interplay between these systems and the mammalian models.

An increasing number of workers from different fields have turned to insects, fish, worms and other model hosts as facile, ethically expedient, relatively simple, and inexpensive hosts to model a variety of human infectious diseases and to study host responses and innate immunity. Because many of these hosts are genetically tractable, they can be used in conjunction with an appropriate pathogen to study host innate immunity.

Remarkably, a common, fundamental set of molecular mechanisms is employed by a significant number of microbial pathogens against a widely divergent array of metazoan hosts. Moreover, the immune responses of these model hosts have contributed important insights in our understanding of evolutionarily preserved immune responses.

Proposed Fields of Study:
* Bacteriology
* Biology of C. elegans, D. melanogaster, Galleria mellonella and the other non-vertebrate model hosts
* Evolutionary biology
* Innate immunity
* Medicinal chemistry
* Mice and other mammalian hosts
* Microbial pathogenesis
* Microbiology
* Molecular biology
* Mycology

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